SoS vs. President

I have been pondering the upcoming election here recently, because it seems to be a lot of what I have been writing about this year, and there's always a new angle to take on it.

One thing that it is incredibly hard to separate is the campaign itself from the governing that the winning candidate will eventually have to do.  Barack Obama, for example, was a very effective campaigner and candidate but an entirely useless, if not pernicious, president when he actually had to do the job for which he won the election.

Campaigner, yes.  Effective president, not even close, unless by "effective" you mean "effective in diminishing the USA, inciting class warfare and digging a huge debt hole."

I'm particularly pondering the spectacle of Hillary Clinton getting elected, and as that frightening thought is pondered, it metastasizes into having to imagine her being president.  That's a completely different beast, in every sense of the word, and even more scary.

Here's the thing.  I have written in the past about how Hillary, at 69 soon, is simply not going to change now.  She is the person she is going to be, and that includes an ethical and moral compass that already points in a criminally deficient direction.

And of course, we have her years as Secretary of State to determine precisely where that compass needle points.  And it's not a nice direction.

Think about it.  What was the very first thing that Hillary Clinton did, on the very day that her confirmation hearings began?  That's right, she arranged on that very day to set up a private email server, for her use and that of a couple close slavish toadies -- Huma Abedin, Sheryl Mills and the like.

We know that was done to keep secrets from the FOIA eyes, written into Federal law to prevent exactly what she wanted to do.  Those secrets, we now know, include her use of the Clinton Foundation as a means to allow foreign governments -- including corrupt ones like Kazakhstan -- to influence U.S. policy.  It also created the channel by which the Clintons could be financially enriched by those governments -- and private-sector opportunists there --  paying for Bill Clinton to make speeches.

So we can only conclude that the use of the private server was to hide what she had intended to do all along, i.e., to enrich herself and her family by the use of her position as Secretary of State.  That was always, it seems, the plan.  It could even have been a condition of accepting the job; had she not, she would have been a difficult Democrat-side issue for Obama.

Given that it appears that Hillary began her tenure as Secretary of State figuring out how to make herself rich, and given that she's far too old to change morally and ethically, how does that relate to what we should expect from her if she were, God forbid, elected president?

She didn't, let's remember, allow an Inspector General to be appointed at State for years.  So what does it smell like to have a person in the White House, completely free of ethical and moral oversight?  There's no IG for the president, and you and I will be paying for plenty of staff lawyers there to defend her, not to protect the voter and the taxpayer.

We all should be thinking hard now about what she would do the first few weeks, to put in systems and processes designed to prevent anyone from knowing what she is doing behind the scenes to enrich herself.  We would need to figure how to force transparency onto someone who would be the most opaque of presidents.

We hear now that the Clinton Foundation will no longer accept donations from foreign governments and business "if she is elected."  Of course, if it would be corrupt then, it is corrupt now, and was correct when she was Secretary, a thought which tells you everything you have to be thinking about in terms of the expected ethical guidance in a Hillary administration.

But corruption is the Clintons' mode of operation; self-enrichment is their goal.  The betterment of the taxpaying citizen?  Not even on her radar screen.

Who, then, will watch over her?

Copyright 2016 by Robert Sutton
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